What advice would you give people who want to get into the same line of work as you? Young people who are studying to become teachers usually tend to have this misconception that they have to constantly be 100 percent prepared at all times. There’s an expectation that you must be armed to the teeth with completely original ideas or activities that will always perfectly engage and enrich your students. I can’t think of anything that is more entirely untrue. Perfection is not part of our job description. Teachers are improvisors. You will learn that oftentimes the very best ideas are the ones that you bogart from others. You’ll figure out a way to appropriate it and reshape it to fit the feel and the culture of your classroom. And in that way, it has become your own original creation.

Why did you choose to live and work in the Hattiesburg area? While living in Hattiesburg and attending USM, I fell in love with the close-knit feel of the city. Everything about working and living in Hattiesburg felt very much like home to me. It was the same with FCAHS. The faculty and students here really make an effort to make you feel like you’re family. I remember the first time I drove out into the green little hamlet of Brooklyn I felt like FCAHS was definitely a place I could call home for the rest of my teaching career.

What do you do in your free time? I always enjoy spending my time with my friends and family. We’re all big fans of the restaurant fare around town and meeting up for drinks and dinner tends to be our choice activity. My partner and I enjoy some "nerdier" interests such as tabletop gaming, comic books and professional wrestling. During the warmer months, I also love to garden, which tends to be a little tricky living in an apartment. And being an English teacher, I would be remiss to not mention that I enjoy reading (although podcasts and audiobooks seem to be the more prudent way of consuming text these days.)

If you could meet anyone, living or dead, who would it be and why? I would love to have met Carrie Fisher. She was a woman who was so deeply faceted and complicated, that she really made for a remarkable and fascinating figure in our modern popular culture. Her impenetrable resolve, razor wit, endless depths of creativity and the humor in which she dealt with all things in life is a set of attributes I hope to embody one day.

If you could go back 10 years and give a younger you tips or advice on life, work or anything in general, what would it be? Don’t stop yourself from openly enjoying something just because others deem it unworthy or uncool. Exhibiting enthusiasm for something is not shameful or embarrassing. On the contrary: it makes for a much more genuine personality and one day, society will appreciate it and will wish that they saw it more in people. So have fun and don’t let anyone shut you down!